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SenseHub: an online community of Digital Makers

Some time ago, I helped put together a proposal to the Nesta Digital Makers Fund to create a online community portal that would help young digital makers to learn about, collaborate on and share Internet of Things prototypes, that were built using the Open University's Sense Kit.

The video above was part of this proposal and last week we got the exciting news that we have been shortlisted to come and pitch our idea in person to the selection panel. This call for proposals attracted a whole collection of really interesting ideas and it is really great to have our idea selected for the next round of the process. Pitch day is in a week's time and hopefully I'll have further good news to write about the SenseHub very soon!

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There is a proliferation of devices being developed to form the building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT), from Internet-connected power sockets and light bulbs to kettles, toasters and washing machines. However, to realise the full potential of the IoT, it will be necessary to allow these devices to interconnect and share data with each other to deliver the functionalities required by end-users. In recent research on end-user programming for the IoT, my colleagues Pierre Akiki, Yijun Yu and myself have proposed the notion of Visual Simple Transformations (ViSiT), that provides a visual programming paradigm for users to wire together IoT devices. The video above shows a demonstration of the ViSiT solution and full details of the approach will appear in an upcoming special issue of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI).

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Recent DDoS attacks on key internet services, like the attack that affected the Dyn domain name service, highlighted the security challenges associated with the proliferation of insecure Internet of Things (IoT) systems. This attack exploited common vulnerabilities like the use of default administration passwords on IoT devices such as internet-enabled CCTV cameras, internet-enabled appliances and smart home devices, to recruit over hundreds of thousands of nodes into a botnet. This capability highlights the cyber security threats associated with the IoT and brings into sharp relief the importance of considering both security and privacy when designing these systems.

In recent work, presented at the Internet of Things Conference, we describe a privacy-by-design framework for assessing the privacy capabilities of IoT applications and platforms. Building on more general design strategies for privacy in informaiton …

UPDATE: Exciting opportunities to join the team for this research project - we have vacancies for a Software Engineering post-doc: http://www.open.ac.uk/about/employment/vacancies/post-doctoral-research-associate-15086and a Research Software Engineer: http://www.open.ac.uk/about/employment/vacancies/research-software-engineer-15085
I am excited to learn that our bid to undertake a new EPSRC funded research project, "Citizen Forensics" has been successful. The project sits at the intersection of software engineering, psychology, policing and power/politics/economics, exploring the use of technology to improve collaboration between citizens and the police. I will be leading the project, which will involve my colleagues Blaine Price, Bashar Nuseibeh, Graham Pike (OU Psychology / Centre for Policing Research & Learning), Mark Levine (Psychology Exeter) and Peter Bloom (OU Faculty of Business & Law).

A key challenge of the project is to investigate how adaptive software…